Bloody Australia Day

Ok, before any of you patriots get yourselves into a lather, I'm not bagging Australia Day. It's just that ours was bloody - literally. Big Squid was engaged in the traditional Aussie ritual of preparing meat for the barbie, when he knocked the chef's knife off the bench and attempted to stop it... with his arm. One ambulance ride, six stitches, a tied-off vein and a tetanus shot later, the Big Squid is fine - but it was pretty scary.

Some hours later, when we'd both recovered from all the excitement, Nurse Bug had a chance to read the lovely review of The Great Gatsby that came out in The Weekend Australian that same day. This is actually the first time the book has been reviewed in a newspaper. It has featured in quite a number of newspaper articles, and has been reviewed in lit/publishing mags, but this was the first newspaper review, and I was thrilled with it. It gladdened my scribbler's heart even more to see that the critic (Cefn Ridout - a comics specialist, I think) didn't start with the "graphic novels - now here's a novelty!" approach, but got straight down to a serious, in-depth review of the particular book. He also looked at Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, and gave it a glowing rap too. Very happy indeed. Aha - and here's the review online.

In amongst all this I've been hard at work on those backgrounds for Hamlet, which of course are spiralling into ever-increasing levels of detail. Here's the second one:
Big Squid provided very helpful technical input for this picture. In fact, he caught me just in time before I ended up painting helical ice-stairs that were physically impossible. He pointed out that if I wanted them to look as they do, they had to actually be double rather than single helices.

He's a whiz, my Squid. And to celebrate his near miss, we went to see the most appropriate film on offer at our lovely local cinema: Sweeney Todd. Happy bloody Australia Day!